Commentary –

Learning To Live With Poison

By William A. Collins

Fouled up water,

Land and air;

Just too busy

Now, to care.

As each of us gets richer, we enjoy the luxury of greater personal safety. We may move to a better neighborhood, if not a gated one. We may move up to a bigger SUV. We may visit the doctor more. We may shop at better grocery stores. We may even hire someone else to climb up and clean our gutters. Connecticut thrives on this sort of upgrading.

For some reason, though, despite being the richest state, we’re tentative about enhancing our collective safety. Perhaps we’re satisfied that life expectancy keeps climbing without much overt action on our part. Perhaps we take comfort that Connecticut’s one galloping epidemic – asthma – mostly afflicts inner city kids. Or perhaps, as citizens who appreciate a high stock price, we’re reluctant to go after corporations who make tidy sums for us by compromising our air, land, and water.

Whatever the reasons, spiffy Connecticut rarely leads the pack in stamping out environmental poisons. This tolerance for pollution sports its own poster child, the Filthy Five power plants. The General Assembly, sensing the absence of any public ground swell, has repeatedly let them off the hook. A mess of pottage, in the form of campaign contributions, has been a sufficient cause for inaction. Shrewdly, the governor has pretended to step into the breach and crack down with new regulations. But these regulations contain a huge loophole. He knows that it doesn’t much matter, since the pressure for cleanup has been coming chiefly from newspapers, not from the public.

Our record on auto emissions is likewise marred. On the one hand, we have joined California and others in cracking down on exhaust from heavy trucks and buses. On the other hand, we took a dive on regulating cars. Many states joined California in setting stern limits on them, but we chose to back off.

On the plus side, Connecticut has been active in suing upwind states to cut down on the sulfur and nitrogen gases from their power plants. But that’s an easy shot. It’s someone else’s ox that’s getting gored. We’ve been far less aggressive on mercury, since that would require more sacrifice on our part.

Mercury, as we know by now, is a terrible poison. Massachusetts and Rhode Island are beside themselves in trying to reduce it. But Connecticut doesn’t even measure it carefully. To do so would cause alarm, and perhaps anger, at our own garbage-burning plants. They are the largest source in New England.

And inasmuch as we’re not even sure how to scrub mercury from smoke stacks, we might instead have to cut down on its use. That would mean less efficient batteries, florescent bulbs, computers, TVs, and even dish detergents. Few lawmakers want to get into that. Besides, mercury is only one airborne culprit. Lead has made a big comeback too, especially in computers. And chlorine is everywhere, particularly in paper and plastics, thus filling our air, water, and land with dioxin and PCBs. Sure, we’d like to reduce these poisons, but they do make our paper so white, our plastics so soft, and our computers so fast. Maybe a little cancer and retardation is a small price to pay after all.

And so it seems that the richer we get, the more spoiled we become. We want our products to be perfect, and don’t want to bother recycling them. Unfortunately, even a gated community can’t fence out the dangers caused by that.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)